Part I of Bill's Family Quest

James Stonewall's Riddle

Unbeknowns't to me, my Great-grandfather, James Stonewall, started me on a quest when I was five or six years old. I knew I had been named after my Grand-father, William Chester VAN DOREN, on my mother's side of the family. What I believe I remember James Stonewall telling me, was that I also have his Grandfather's name William as well. But now that I have inhereted his family bible, I find his grandfather's name is missing.

Now years earlier, when my mother was around eight (8) she first heard him tell, for the first of many times, the following story and poem. Her parents were visiting at the WHEELER's dairy farm on Hobson Road in East Grand Plains southeast of Roswell, NM.

William, his Grandfather, had died from pneumonia while moving from Kentucky to Illinois and was bury where the Ohio and the Washita rivers join. His father James Richard had not been with William and Sarah on the move.

James Stonewall had been taught this poem when he lived with Sarah in Illinois, his Grandmother, while his father was off to the California "Gold Rush", or simply "out of town" during the Civil War, possibly because his relatives back in Kentucky were fighting on the other side:

"FIRST CAME JOHN, THEN WILLIAM, THEN WILL

THEN CAME JAMES WHO LIVED ON THE HILL

NEXT THERE WAS JOHN AND HIS SON JOHN

THEN WILLIAM WHO DIED BY HIS WAGON

NOW THERE IS JAMES RICHARD AND

LAST OF ALL THERE IS ME, JAMES STONEWALL."

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Bill Wheeler
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